>>11509665This is a really, really terrible place to ask questions about computers. You should've asked /g/.
First of all, despite what some idiots here have said, endianness is generally applied only to bytes in multibyte numbers, not bits (for bits, it's better to call it bit numbering).
Second, most processor architectures are either strictly little-endian (which includes x86) or bi-endian (selectable endianness) but the data in network packets is usually big-endian so it's sometimes called "network order". Also, sometimes large numbers have mixed endianness, for example top 32 bits of a 64-bit number may be laid out in little-endian but located at a lower memory address than the lower 32 bits.
Now, to answer you question directly, there are several advantages of little-endian systems. One of them is that it allows you to propagate carry bit more easily - if you add a byte to a memory location then the carry bit is simply added to the next memory address, in case of big-endian you would have to move backwards. The other advantage, which is frequently used in low level code, is that little-endian numbers can be read from the same memory location in different sizes, so, for example, 0x000000A5 is the same value if read as a byte, half-word or word and 0x00005AA5 is the same if read as a half-word or word.
Historically, it wasn't just the question of reading bytes from memory but also processing bytes received from a serial bus where you would want to process data as soon as it arrives and not wait for the last byte before starting to do something with it.
